Guild Wars 2

I remeber before the game coming out that there will be minigames in each city, in Divinity’s reach for exemple Bar browl, but never happened.Also ratasum there should be polymok but never happened….so sad

There is an unfinished Polymok Arena just north of Rata Sum. I wonder if Anet are going to eventually implement it in-game. That would be awesome.

Sadismo.7508:

There is an unfinished Polymok Arena just north of Rata Sum. I wonder if Anet are going to eventually implement it in-game. That would be awesome.

Only if management can think up a way to push it through the gem store or make an expansion out of it…

I’m complaining over this fact and keep on rememberign ANet that they announced these things to be part of the game already now for 5 years since release dat of the game, because the original plan of ANet was basically, that these things should have been in the game already from day 1 on…

Now have 5 years passed and all these things are still missing. Naets Game Design is still full of gaps like a switcher cheese as usual and I’m pretty sure, we will see nothing of these things to appear for even further the next 2+ years… unless ANet remedies finally their designer altzheimer and remembers themself again, on these things,, which were originally once planned for the game to exist …

- Polymock … an Asura Gate in the works for 5 years.. how long must that poor lone asuran engineer still work at it, until he’s finally done???
- Bar Brawls ..Anet once had at least their Achievements imlemented to the game, but that just removed everythign and from that day on we neve ever heard or have seen aynthing about it anymore – Anet is as usual totally silent about it and on this topic they havend had in those years not at all even at least the respect to tell us, what happened with this, so that we know at least ,where we are standing now.
If this is even at all a thing for GW, or if it has been already put forever ice years ago…
- Target Shooting – Another Town Minigame, that never found its way into the game, but was once originally planned for Divinitys Reach as part of its carnival – stil lwaiting on a Divinities Reach Carnival Festival or something like that which finally introduces the stuff that should been already there in DR for 5 years

Instead of these thigns people expected that shoulkd be in the game, they gave us such unwanted stuff like Crab Toss and Southsun Survial as part of the Living Story and messed the whole idea of Town activities then up by just putting a general activity npc into Lioons Arch destroyign this way basically the intention to have to go visit the various towns to play in them the actitivies, so that people have a REASON to actually go to the various cities – but god forbid, we have lazy player, which want to have everythign in a central place – so we just put that npc into L.A and good is – topic closed/sarcasm

Then there was the Aspect Arena and the Labyrinthine Cliffs – a place I don#t know why anet doesn’t make this place permanentable accessible as some kind of reworked normal explorable MAP together with the Aspect Arena becoming a permanet minigame with its own achievements like the others … like said, usual switzer cheese with many holes here … this is one of them.
Can understand that seasonal/festival activities aren’t permanent accessible, but AA absolutely was not part of any festival nor a seasonal minigame like the stuff from halloween or wintersday.

I also don’t know why anet just made this kind of Basketball like minigame for lettting us play it just for a few weeks and then just removign it again, instead of keeping it and giving it likle all others their own achievements, especially when its something thats appreciated and liked by most of the community – havent read here anything bad about it.

The original plans of anet included around 30 Minigame Activities they planned to do for the towns – so practically kile when even outed – 5 Minigame Activities per Town if each of the 6 Towns would get equally much (DR, LA, HB, RS, TG, BC)

DR with:
- Target Shooting
- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?

LA with
- Bar Brawls
- Belcher Bluffing
- ?
- ?
- ?

Hoelbrak with:

- Keg Brawl
- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?

Rata Sum with:
- Polymok
- Super Adventure Box
- Golem Chess
- ?
- ???

The Grove with:
- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?

and lastly the Black Citadel with:

- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?

As you can see, this isn’t worked out much and I’m pretty sure, that some of their original minigame activities liek Target Shooting have been reworked with HoT now as part of the “Adventures” which are basically now all minigames.
Howeve,r this doesn#t change a single bit on the fact, that the Towns are basically dead, people hang practically out there only to make breaks from the maps outside of the towns, but you can do practically nothing in th towns, because the towns don’t have their own events and activities, which is kind of sad to see, when basically all other places in this game have dynamic events, but just not the towns as well.

But with Path of Fire beign near I guess this will change, because I’ve seen in the first town we visit – Amnoon Oasis, that there are in that town this time also events if I saw right. If that is right, then I can hope only, that Anet will improve also retroactively that way all other towns as well… can’t be wished too much, nor too hard to add some events to the towns to make them more interesting and that not only just when some seasonal stuff is going on …

If you just look at PoF’s Mount Races and compare them to adventures like Ley Line Run and Flying Circus, and then compare those to Sanctum Sprint, or look at Basket Brawl and compare it to Keg Brawl, you’ll find that the quality, complexity, and creativity of activities/adventures/minigames has gone way downhill. If you look at how seasonal events have been handled over the past couple years and how everything is pretty copy-paste despite not being all that rewarding or demanding, especially for or of anyone of decent skill, or how games like Aspect Arena and especially Reaper’s Rumble do not make consistent returns to the game, or how broken two of the four daily activities are and have been since their inception, you’ll see how little interest the developers have in improving or showcasing this kind of content.

Orpheal.8263:

I also don’t know why anet just made this kind of Basketball like minigame for lettting us play it just for a few weeks and then just removign it again, instead of keeping it and giving it likle all others their own achievements, especially when its something thats appreciated and liked by most of the community – havent read here anything bad about it.

The reason you haven’t read anything bad about it is because this forum is a terrible place for honest, critical feedback. You can find mine in the link above. Also, nobody actually cares about that game.

Devs hardly ever answer these posts here at all . but I can say you will like the new pack coming out fully . it will be full of mini games . think it is their way for making up for hardly any events like winters day in July and so forth in the game . even tho I am not a fan at all of mini games . I think thos that want them should have them to enjoy . just like any other game type

PoF won’t be an escuse for me, therefore that ANet has left all the other main towns of th game dead for basically 5 years as long there was no kind of seasonal festival going on (and even then it happend mostly all the time only in LA)

Anet needs to revive the main towns with new content – minigames are new content, new content that will bring people to go visit the towns and do actually something in them. And an Expansion shouldn’t be an excuse therefore to not anything about this.

GW2 needs Polymock, Bar Brawls & Co.
Its also for ANet an easy way to add new content for achievements as well and thats something that ANet needs also to ensure, that people get enough of them… we are still tens of thousands of AP away to reach the current maximum planned milestone of 60000 AP that ANet has planned ahead

I just hope, that we will see at least in near future at least finally Bar Brawls and especially Polymock, because especialyl Polymock has due to it being also a GW1 minigame nostalgia and Bar Brawls, because basically the achievements for it and the minigame itself already EXIST, but whyever Anet decided to just remove everything about it, before implementing it fully into the game and then go totally silent about it until today >.>

If Bar Brawls end out to become now some kind of PoF Adventure for example in Amnoon, then thats also not something that would be the same for me, than Bar Brawls being actually a Minigame, because Adventures are no minigames.

Adventures are Solo Content, while actually a real minigame is Multiplayer Content and thats the essence, from which MMO’s live from mainly.

I’d really love to seeas well in GW2 some kind of Ingame Card Collection Minigame you can play with other players similar to FF8s Triple Triad.
That would be so much fun, if we could have then ingame also something like Card Battle Tournaments, cause that would bring the oroginal aspect and inspiration of GW – Magic the Gathering – kind of somehow back to the game too ^^

I travel almost to Polymock arena, it’s just an unliving flat stadium, and the asuran gate isn’t working as the metamagic lab at the north of rata sum. Always remember as said in first post, this poor asuran engineer working on the asuran gate for now 5 years, what is that seriously? But they are actually a lot of strange unfinished things inside the game:
-Two asuran gates at the north of Metrica Province guarded by inquest but they aren’t functionnal with a big flat black wall behind.
-Actually you can walk at the bottom of rata sum inside her pits, but they are nothing there.
-The mysterious unfinished blue test area of the infinity coil.
-Many hidden caverns in lion’s arch are empty appart the one with mektiki.
-The mysterious caudecus room outside the caudecus mansion map.
-Haunted grounds at black citadel are full of ascalonian ghost, but at the extreme end of north-west, you find a closed fence with what it seem to be a dungeon/path.
-Condammned cavern from Black citadel is just a cavern with an waterfall and some fire legion artefacts.
-And so on, and so on….

We seriously need games, I would enjoy playing polymock, we only got SAB actually.

I imagine the lack of popularity is behind any further development. The activities outside of festivals are likely largely a wash out. Sure, players will go and do a quick daily and some players even made quite a name for themselves in the hunger games style one, but I would be surprised if their metrics ever showed much use out of them. I think they even experimented with new ones liek the weird basketball style one last year. I don;t remember that getting a lot of praise

The shooting range in DR was specifically moved to Verdant Brink as an adventure. However, whilst some of the adventures were quite fun, there has been a lot of hostile feedback to them. Partly due to the gating of mastery points, but then again, without the mastery points, would many do them regularly?

So whilst I could imagine Polymock, properly implemented could be successful, realistically, the others would be probably prove to dead content very quickly and so why waste the time making them if not enough actually play them?

Some additions about Orpheal post:
DR with:
- Target Shooting – Comedy contest – Belcher’s bluffing – Crown Pavillon – ?

LA with
- Bar Brawls – Belcher Bluffing – SouthSun cove survival – Crab toss – ?

Hoelbrak with:
- Keg Brawl – PvP battle – Belcher Bluffing – ? – ?

Rata Sum with:
- Polymok – SABox – Golem Chess – Exocombinaison battles – ???

The Grove with:
- Belcher Bluffing – Sanctum sprint – ? – ? – ?

and lastly the Black Citadel with:
- Gladiator arena – Belcher Bluffing – Cattapult betting – ? – ?

Southsun Survival is no LA Minigame, its a Minigam that originally belongs to Southsun Cove and should be playable only these, so that people have a reason to go to that Map

Same with Crab Toss.

Crown Pavillion is no Minigame, its a Festival thats all about farming materials and battling some challenging Solo Battles

Sanctum Sprint has nothing to do with the Grove, it was a Living World Minigame Anet added together with Aspect Arena specificly basically for an extra for this made tiny explorable map, the Laberynthine Cliff (or similar written xD), which i think should become a permanently accessible map and made bigger/actually useful more also with some PvE content inside of it generally.
—-

Cattapult Betting? Can’t think of this as a Minigame, srry. Its just a money sink fun part of an event ^^
But Gladiator Arena could be made actually into something that could work as Minigame, if its not just like Crown pavillion fighting agaisnt NCps, but agaisnt other players with everyone participatign having “Gladiator Skills” that work differently than just normal Class Skills to make the Gladiator Battles more fun to look at especially

—

But I like the Comedy Contest idea for DR ^^ basically as a minigame thats based around th idea of bringign as many people to laugh in DR as possible in a certain amount of time as a competition of improvisation and creativity, as long the minigame privides enough freedom for this to do all kinds of funny things that could bring NPCs hopefully to laugh, like for example somethign simply, you see somewhere some pies and you just grab them at the right moment, throwing them into some NPCs face, makign that way some kids in the near die hard laugh loud out LOL

Or classics, you just run to a npc and try tellign them some random jokes ^^ So much possibilities.
Howeve,r i woudl find it good if we continue using this thread for ideas and concepts of Minigames for the town.
Let us overflow Anet with good minigame ideas so that the towns actually become more full of live with the help of activities/minigames/events/adventures to do in them ^^

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

I can say you will like the new pack coming out fully . it will be full of mini games .

I’ve seen videos of Mount Races. It’s extremely watered-down compared to Sanctum Sprint or Rollerbeetle Racing. Not at all a vote of confidence for anything ANet may do with the format.

Randulf.7614:

I imagine the lack of popularity is behind any further development.

You are casting a symptom as a cause. I’d ask you to read this, but since you glossed over it the first time it was linked in this thread, let me go over here why these games aren’t populated:

• Weak rewards: Activity rewards are garbage. I understand that their purpose is not to be farmed or to make great money and that they are essentially accessible to all characters, but what is earned for playing these games is so paltry that I doubt it even enters anyone’s mind as a reason for playing. No rewards are exclusive to any of the formats or genre as a whole (except for the Kegmaster title by some people’s standards).
• Time-gated rewards: Related to the last point, the existence of so many time-gated rewards like certain refinements and chests competes with activities due to their limited nature. If a player neglects to play an activity on a given day, they can go back to it another day when it’s open and play it, spending as much time as they wish to catch up on achievement progress or earning their meager rewards. If they skip their daily refinements though, they can’t make it up. They forever lose that day’s potential for that reward. This kind of content is a strong draw away from any content not like it, like activities.
• Easy, lack of driver for skill: Being multiplayer games, activities are as hard as the people who play them are skilled. However, the incentives for becoming good at any of these activities don’t exist. Each game has a reward for winning that is only slightly better than those below it. Neither the difference nor absolute amount are so great as to justify anyone spending time mastering the game to earn that reward. There is no other prestige or recognition for it either. Good competition doesn’t blossom because the stakes are so incredibly low and the effort-to-output ratio is so tremendous that hardly anyone bothers.
• Buggy and broken: Glitch abuse is ripe in every daily activity mode, the details of each you may research yourself. Some glitches have existed as early as the specific game’s introduction. Abuse of these glitches can quickly cheapen or ruin the experience of some players. Some, by the way, can be used to considerably improve reward gains, and if you do that, you are still miles and leagues behind anything respectable for income.
• Fundamentally flawed: Three of the four daily activities have winning strategies that go against the spirit of the game, and the last one can be bug abused to force a win in under ten seconds. Every team game is ruined by team switching and leavers. Achievement tracks in some games reward and promote bad play and, for lack of a better term, toxic behavior.
• No parties: You can’t enter games as a group, have private rooms for your group, or find your friends in any of the active instances and join them. Yes, I am aware of ANet having talked about technical limitations to doing this. No, that does not excuse it from being something players want.
• Critical mass: The one area where population actually does matter as a cause for a lack of popularity. Nobody wants to play a multiplayer game that nobody else is playing. When you enter activities on any day that isn’t a daily participation day, they are ghost towns (perhaps with exception to Keg Brawl). Even on daily participation days, everyone clears the room when the game ends.

So, if not merely a matter of population, what’s the real reason behind developer resources not going towards activities? I can think of two:

• Bypasses business model: Activities are what I spent the bulk of my time in-game on after becoming disgusted with so many other parts of the game. The upside was that activities are mostly shielded from any changes that ANet makes to the game proper. You don’t care about ascended gear, infusions, trait changes, specializations, or any sort of character progression because none of that affects you or the game in any activity. The downside is that by ANet having nothing to sell you, they have no incentive to market towards or develop for you. Working on activities does not bring in any cash directly to ANet.
• Lack of developer skill or vision: Basket Brawl is the worst minigame in Guild Wars franchise history (Nine Rings and Rings of Fortune don’t count) and, being their most recent work with activities, paints a very grim picture of the studio’s understanding of not only what makes their minigames succeed or fail, but of what minigames they’ve even made in recent past. Whoever is working on these games now is either an amateur or doesn’t know what they’re doing, or both. I remember Basket Brawl being introduced as a test bed for other things ANet might have wanted to do in the future with activities. If that is indicative of the kind of quality or approach the studio intends to take towards activities, then the games would likely be better off left untouched.

How do we, the players, solve this dilemma? We don’t. At least, I don’t. I have a long enough history of putting out ideas for the improvement of modes like this that have gone unheeded to not want to bother drumming up new answers for ANet. Let them first show me some genuine interest and progress in the format. Basket Brawl is not that.

oh yes, how could I just have forgotten them.. these are classic GW1 minigames, that need to return as well besides of polymock.

Rollerbeetle Racing together with several different racing tracks all over tyria, like basically 15-18, different tracks or so, including rollerbeetle championships

Rollerbeetle Racing would make up as a perfect Minigame for a PoF Town like either Amnoon oasis, or Vabbi or could become a DR Minicame as part of the carnival/circus being some kind of attraction for the Town.

Each Town should be definetely its own racing track.
oooh, Rollerbeetle Racing 2.0 could become so much fun, especialyl when the skilsl get better reworked and more balanced this time.

Nine Rings could be also reworked into some kind of minigame, which could work then as a LA Minigame, while beign eventually at the same tiem also a good money sink liek in GW1

Orpheal.8263:

Rollerbeetle Racing together with several different racing tracks all over tyria, like basically 15-18, different tracks or so, including rollerbeetle championships

Rollerbeetle Racing does not need to be added into GW2. Sanctum Sprint is already a racing game better suited for GW2, taking advantage of things like the Z-axis and endurance bar. Sanctum Sprint is not as fleshed out, balanced, polished, supported, or successful as RBR was, but there is abundant room to expand upon it and make it even better than RBR. The ceiling of success for Sanctum Sprint is much higher, yet remains untapped. Its improvement should take precedence to adding RBR, which should really just be left alone altogether as far as GW2 is concerned.

Nine Rings could be also reworked into some kind of minigame, which could work then as a LA Minigame, while beign eventually at the same tiem also a good money sink liek in GW1

Nine Rings and all games like it can and should stay dead.

Ideas for minigames:

Rata Sum
Polymok Arena, a way to battle using mini pets. They have stats, they have skills, you can train them, teach them, and set strategies. You can either drop a team of 5-6 minipets off (they become unavailable for the time being), or you can actively fight with a smaller team but able to change tactics on the fly (which also gives you as the master some xp).
Prizes include a currency used to purchase various goods which can change seasonally, new minipets, titles, titles for minipets and fancy extras for minipets.

Lion’s Arch
Bar Brawl, basically Southsun Survival in a tavern with everyone so drunk even control fails half the time. Points are given for staying alive and drinking as much as you can (which in turn makes you weaker!).
Prizes include various titles, a mount, various special drinks which double as buff-food (rare-type), and access to a Brewing crafting skill which is used to create those buff-food drinks afterwards. To train, needs more bar brawl. The drinks are not superior to cooking, it’s just an alternative.

Divinity’s Reach
Masquerade, where you have to assassinate a player without knowing who they are, while avoiding your own assassin. Everyone seems like an NPC at first glance, so you need to observe behaviour. There would be ~12 players and ~30-40 extra NPCs constantly doing things thrown in, so it becomes difficult to know who the players are and what they’re doing. NPCs are highly randomized to make learning impossible.
Among the rewards could be fancy masks or a special home instance which is accessible while you are ranked high enough which is super fancy (no other effects, you just get to enjoy a fancy home instance).

The Grove
Dream Defense, a turret defense style game played cooperatively with up to 5 players, scaling on how many lanes enemies attack depending on player count. You recruit extra sylvari for defense, you build special “towers”, you can Dungeon Keeper style relinquish top-down control to temporarily control your own character normally and fight yourself.
Rewards should, IMO, include a sensible layout for the city. Failing to add that, cool rewards would be extra levels where to defend the dream (in other parts of the world basically), an aura, defensive turrets for your home instance which kill supposed assassins each day you can then loot for some small rewards, and a dream shadow mount skin for the skimmer, a floating eerie dragon-like creature.

Haven’t thought of something for the other two cities. Yet :P